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Etoile Project Releases Mac-Like Environment
pschmied writes "Today the Étoilé Project released v0.2 of its Desktop Environment. Not only does Étoilé share user interface similarities with Mac OS X, Étoilé enjoys some source-level compatibility with Mac OS X as well. Many here undoubtedly remember NeXT, the revolutionary computer / development environment that gave rise to the first Web browser and later became the foundation of Mac OS X. Étoilé uses the FSF's own implementation of the NeXT development environment, GNUstep, making this a close technological relative of OS X. Screenshots and a source tarball are available."
The very first web browser (called WorldWideWeb) was developed on a NeXT by Tim Berners-Lee.
Circumcision is child abuse.
No, it's not a window manager. It's more analogous to something like GNOME or KDE with their associated libraries.
u ntuppc-610.html
Here's a rough step-by-step:
1. Install the dependencies listed here: http://gnustep.blogspot.com/2006/10/gnustep-on-ub
2. Use the GNUStep "Startup" package (you need a newer version of GNUStep than what is bundled with Ubuntu): http://www.gnustep.org/experience/Startup.html
3. Compile Etoile per the instructions in the tarball.
It's a bit different procedure than your average configure, make, make install. My hope is that someone will start packaging current versions for Ubuntu. Maybe I'll get off my duff and start doing that.
Cheers,
Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
I believe this was fixed in 3.2. In any case, with the most recent version of KDE (3.5.6) I can't click above the menu bar.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
In fact if I got TFA it has similarities with what the mac could have been if Apple didn't practically kill hypercard and left the newton and opendoc to wither. The monolithic app is what commercial software vendors want, while a document or object centric environment is very exciting from the power user point of view. In fact is kinda translating the unix philosophy of making specialized tools work together for complex tasks in a GUI and OO.
If it can be done and they also find ways to integrate the now ubiquitous web applications' data, database, and other languages in that environment we could end up, for example, having a set of remote EJBs and Rails's active record objects, a couple local database rows and some emails being processed by a filter written in c that once belonged to openoffice calc, ending up in a nice graph.
Anyway, Gnome's bonobo, netbeans and probably lots of other projects wanted to achieve something like this as a primary or secondary goal, maybe people don't want such a paradigm shift.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
I'm not sure I understand your comment. I think you don't get the usual Mac workflow.
(a) The dock (which sort of doubles as a taskbar) is hideable. No screen real-estate need be sacrificed.
(b) The mouse-movement that the menu costs you is a lot easier than the mouse movement for menus attached to windows - that's the point of putting the menus at the top of the screen.
(c) If I'm using multiple applications on the same screen (and I'm not using a virtual-desktop, which to be fair I usually do), then I use Exposé to switch between them. It's bound to my 5th mouse button so it works anywhere and it's very quick.
(d) There are other ways the Mac tries to speed workflow, but to be fair, other systems have extras too, so I'll stick to what you identified...
You don't have to like the Mac way of doing things, but you ought to try it with a fair mind before criticising it...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Mac OS X's Cocoa API is based on the OpenStep API, so Étoilé and GNUstep are related to Mac OS X through the OpenStep API. If you really love the Cocoa API and you want to make an app for Linux, you should take a look at GNUstep.
Here's a tip... tune your mouse acceleration settings so that the mouse goes completely to the left and right (or top and bottom if your monitor is in portrait orientation) in one sweep of the mouse, then you'll find you can reach any point on your screen in just one sweep of the mouse. This works not only for menus, but for taskbars and Docks as well.
If you're seriously having to use more than one movement of the mouse to get from say, the top-left of your monitor to the bottom-right of your monitor and don't know how to fix it then you should have your geek card revoked.
Hitting a unified menubar or taskbar is exactly the same process, "slam" the mouse to the bottom of the screen and you're there no "voyaging" involved. There's a lot of well established ergonomic research to suggest that screen edges are good places for commonly used objects because they are effectively infinitely large in a certain direction, and that research has been heeded by ALL major OS vendors in one way or another.
Interestingly, research suggests that the time to acquire objects like menu bars is purely a function of their size and their distance from where your hands (or pointer on a computer) spend most of their time. Once you are "up to speed" with an interface, those are the only factors that matter in acquiring a target, the training of the user is irrelevant.
That suggests that both attached and detached menu bars are a good idea, attached menu bars by virtue of being close at hand to the content that you're manipulating, and detached menu bars by virtue of being effectively enormous in size. I'm certain, as would be anyone with common-sense that all users can acquire a menu bar at the top of the screen more quickly than one in the middle of the screen.
However, as you state above unless the user is quitting the application they probably have to return to the application window, this is still a much larger target than a menu bar, but leaves you much further from the content than the attached menu bar would.
I don't think there actually is a consensus on which type of menu bar is best, but there is a lot of agreement that no-one should have trouble navigating to a detached menu bar, because it's infinitely large, so either you're exaggerating, stupid, or have such unbelievably awful hand-eye coordination that you can't even hit a side of the screen.
Speaking as a Linux, OS X and Windows user with a 24" 1920x1200 monitor.
I think you have these two the wrong way around. GNUstep dates back to at least 1995, while Apple did not buy NeXT until December 1996.